Monday, March 11, 2013

my firstpost piece: @narendramodi has created a social contract like #lee #kuan #yew

There is a cottage industry in India trying to establish analogies for Narendra Modi. The usual suspects have had much fun with this. Hitler! Mussolini! Pol Pot! Genghiz Khan! they cry. Others claim: Indira Gandhi! Ronald Reagan! Margaret Thatcher! Perhaps. But if you look at the social contract that Modi has created, the best analogy may well be Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew.

Comparisons are always odious and never exact. There are differences; yet, there are commonalities. Much as Gujaratis has always been entrepreneurial, so have the Chinese in Singapore. Much as Singapore has rapidly risen to be one of the wealthiest nations in the world through good governance, Gujarat is growing, with the governance in place to sustain growth for a while yet.

3 comments:

Well-written article. The parallels are too many to be ignored. And maybe this is why the media are running scared about the possibility of Modi becoming PM - not because, like Hitler he'll put them in jail (good, oppressed lefties are the first in line for Nobels these days), but because like LKY, he'll completely marginalise them and make them unnecessary...

I have been a fan of your writing since quite a few years. Just wanted to let you know that for the last 1 year I have been writing occasional articles for "The UnReal Times", an India based satire website.

Just want to share the the following article I wrote on Modi which became popular: